G-Man Personal Aid

Posts:2,452

Valve at least avoided true vaporware status by pretty early on telling people it's basically not happening. It's been many years since Valve left it open and especially wasn't promising the game's release.

But pretty early on could be measured in years; I suppose Valve development team truly didn't lose interest for a while.

Does Gabe Newell ever wonder what life would be like without Gordon Freeman?

Sex bomb

Posts:11,495

Valve makes way more money with other business ventures than they'd do with another Half-Life game. It makes sense why 3 isn't high in their priorities list compared to other developers who have to pump out sequels to sure-sellers to survive.

Ivan the Space Biker's Personal Aid

Posts:7,005

Valve makes way more money with other business ventures than they'd do with another Half-Life game. It makes sense why 3 isn't high in their priorities list compared to other developers who have to pump out sequels to sure-sellers to survive.

all of you are wrong, its not Valve's policy to force their employees to work on whats profitable, rather, they pick what they want to work in and what makes the most sense for their talent and enjoyment. Groups form ad-hoc and game releases are driven by that.

What people should understand is that there isn't enough interest in Half Life 3 within Valve's game developers to complete it anytime soon. Maybe there is, its not obvious, but they kept fairly quiet on TF2 and that took 9 years.

We know they had it pretty much done back in 2007, but either they lost interest, or they decided to scrap it all and make something amazing. My sense is that they wanted something more epic, but the game evolution was not there (a la HL2 or TF2 ) and it fizzled with a bare skeleton crew working on it.

I will pray for you Gordon buddy, whatever alien grunt you are killing up there in the heavens...

Gordon Freeman's Personal Aid

Posts:3,458

What people should understand is that there isn't enough interest in Half Life 3 within Valve's game developers to complete it anytime soon. Maybe there is, its not obvious, but they kept fairly quiet on TF2 and that took 9 years.

That's fine but Portal 2 came out of beta more than 5 years ago. Since then the only new game they have released is a set of VR demos (the Lab). Still I will give credit where it's due Valve does a good job of updating their existing multiplayer games.

But it's been 5 years since their last big game and the only thing we have got is a VR demo?
They have not even announced another project officially? What game developer behaves like that?

The thing is AAA game development is very difficult. It takes hundreds of people working diligently on different modular components for years on end in coordinated project towards an end goal. Valve has the talent. The question is do they still have the motivation and capability to get organized and pull that off? Now that there is no financial incentive to do so.

G-Man Personal Aid

Posts:2,452

I bet it is closer to Google's 80/20 rule where 20% of any developer's time is truly left what to that developer wants to do. But otherwise I don't buy the lack of top-down project management that almost all other companies have.

EDIT:

It is not as though Valve didn't give developers back in the day aka 2007-2009 timeframe a say in what games were being made. I bet within the games project sphere Valve probably let the developers say what games they wanted to develop at least until recently. But Steam and VR over the last 5-7 years became too valuable for a company to ignore the pressure of maintaining by taking developer resources away from game development although switching a game developer to an application developer is not that easy.

Does Gabe Newell ever wonder what life would be like without Gordon Freeman?